What the Doctor Cleaned

Kestrel

At seven forty on Christmas morning, I wash my hands.

I do it in the second-floor washroom, at the old porcelain basin with the brass taps that ran hot and cold until the winter I took the post, and have run lukewarm ever since. I use the carbolic soap. I use the nailbrush. I scrub between the fingers and under the nails, and up the wrist to the cuff, and I count as I do it, because counting is the only thing that holds the surface of me together.

Forty seconds. That is what the surgeons say. Forty seconds, for the hands to be clean.

I have done it for ten minutes.

In the mirror above the basin there is a man of forty-one with gray at the temples and a mouth he would like to be rid of. His eyes are rimmed with red. His collar is askew. On his left sleeve, where the cuff has slipped, there is a smear of something dark that is not blood and not ink. I look at it a long time before I understand that it is the lanolin from a pair of knitted mittens.

She wore them, I think. Dahlia. She was wearing them when I came in.

I turn off the tap.

I stand with my wet hands braced on the porcelain, and I look at the man in the glass, and I say, very quietly, in the voice I use for a patient who has asked me whether he is going to die:

"You knew."

The man does not answer.

"You knew, Ambrose. You stood in the dark before a bookcase and told it you were 'rather careless about doors.' You put your hand to a chart and signed a boy out of a prison. You sat with a woman for fifty minutes and said nothing, because you knew perfectly well what would be done to the one who had helped you. And you went to bed."

Tell her to go to bed, I had said.

Go to bed.

I take a towel from the rail and dry my hands, finger by finger. My own voice fills the tiled room, dry and precise, like a man dictating a report.

"That is the clinical summary. I shall add nothing."

…

The state police arrive at nine.

Two of them, in gray overcoats, with the winter-bright faces of men who have been called away from a turkey. I meet them in the hall. I give them coffee in the library. I show them the pantry, with its stove and its enamel mugs and its square of chalk on the linoleum, and I tell them, in the careful, courteous tone I have used for fifteen years to describe the unthinkable, that Nurse Bridget Sorrell was a valued colleague whose death has distressed the whole house.

They are young and polite. They take notes. They ask the questions that are asked.

"Had she seemed depressed?"

"She had seemed, if anything, relieved."

"Any trouble at home?"

"She had a son. Recently moved to a private facility. I arranged it myself." A pause. "Yesterday."

The older one looks at me. "That's good of you, Doctor."

"It was overdue."

"And the note?"

I let him show it to me. I have already read it, at half past two, in the dark, holding it flat with my thumbs. It is a very good forgery. It is typed on Aldenmoor stock, on the old Underwood in the front office, in the clipped, apologetic prose of a woman who has been told what to say. I have taken what was not mine. I could not bear to face you. I am so sorry for the trouble. The signature, in blue ink, is a creditable B. Sorrell.

It is wrong in two places.

She would never have written the trouble. She would have written the bother. And she would not have signed B. She signed Bridie, always, in the corner of a birthday card. I have seen it. I have watched her do it, in the staff room, for the girl who works in the laundry.

I do not say so.

"Is it her hand?" asks the younger man.

"I couldn't say."

"No." He takes the paper back. "Well. It's a sad thing. These nurses. They work so hard."

"Yes," I say. "They do."

I walk them to the door. The snow has stopped. The yard is blue and still; a truck is idling at the gate, gray, with its engine off and its windows dark. I see the older trooper's eyes rest on it, and slide away, and I understand that he has been told not to ask.

"Merry Christmas, Doctor."

"And to you, Officer."

When they have gone I stand in the doorway for some time with my hand on the frame.

Harmon, I think. Trooper Harmon. A quarry. A rain machine.

He has colleagues.

…

She arrives at eleven.

I hear it before I see it: a sound that has no business on this hill, the low soft purr of a long black car on fresh snow. It comes up the drive between the beeches at the speed of a hearse. It stops at the foot of the steps. A man in livery gets out and opens the rear door, and a single black boot, small, expensive, polished to a mirror, comes down onto the snow.

Cordelia Marrow does not look at the house.

She never has. She stands for a moment with her gloved hand on the car roof, a small straight woman in a black wool coat with a collar of dark fur, and looks over the roofs at the line of the hills. She does it as a general looks over a field after the battle. Then she turns, and walks up the steps, and the man in livery holds the door.

"Ambrose."

"Cordelia."

"Merry Christmas."

"I hardly think so."

"No." She hands her coat to the air. Someone takes it. "I came as soon as I heard."

"Who told you?"

"Warren." She draws off her gloves, one finger at a time. "He rang at six. He was very distressed. He's fond of staff, Warren; I've always said so." She looks at me with her pale, dry, unhurried eyes. "Where can we speak?"

I take her to the south parlor.

I do it deliberately. It is the one room in the house with nothing in it to find. A long low parlor on the south side, with a stove, a settee, a bank of mullioned windows that give on the snow, a shelf of leather-bound books that no one reads. I have never once sat in it for pleasure.

Cordelia sits in my chair.

She does not ask. She simply lowers herself into it, with her back straight and her ankles crossed, and places her bag on her knee. It is a gray leather satchel, old, soft at the corners, with a brass clasp. I know it. She has carried it at every board meeting I have ever attended. I have never seen what is in it.

"You've had a trying night," she says.

"A member of my staff is dead."

"A nurse."

"A woman."

"Of course." A small nod. "A woman. Forgive me. I'm told she was devoted."

"She was."

"And a thief."

"I wouldn't know."

"The police seem to think so. I've spoken to the superintendent. He's most sympathetic. The note was clear." She folds her hands. "Dispensary theft. Insulin. A distressed mother, in debt, with a boy in an institution. It's the kind of story one reads in the newspapers and thinks: how sad. Then one turns the page."

"One turns the page."

"One does."

I stand at the window with my hands behind my back. In the glass I can see her reflected, small and upright against the dark leather. The stove ticks.

"Ambrose," says Cordelia, "I want to ask you a question. You needn't answer it immediately."

"Please."

"Why did you move her son?"

…

I turn.

It is a mistake. I know it as I do it; a man who turns too quickly gives away his hand. But there is something in her tone, soft, and level, and entirely without malice, that cuts across my reflexes like a draft under a door.

"I beg your pardon?"

"The boy. Daniel Sorrell. Hollowbrook, eleven years. You had him moved on the twenty-fourth, by car, with a letter on your own letterhead, to a clinic of your own selection." She lifts one eyebrow. "On the morning of the day the mother died."

"It was Christmas Eve."

"Yes."

"I wished to be generous."

"You are never generous, Ambrose." She says it kindly. "It's one of the reasons I have always trusted you. You are attentive, and exact, and sparing. You do not give a thing away unless you are paid for it. So I wondered, when I heard, what you had been paid."

"Nothing."

"Or what you had been promised."

"Nothing, Cordelia."

"Or whom you had been moved by."

She lets it hang.

I look at her.

I have known her for thirty-one years. I have sat at her table, and drunk her sherry, and been asked about my health. She has written me a reference. She has sent flowers to a funeral. She sat at the back of the church in a black hat, with her hands folded, and watched them lower Rosalind into the earth, and when it was done she came and took my arm in the churchyard and said: Ambrose, you must let us take care of you.

I was ten.

I looked at her hand on my sleeve. It was small, and dry, and cool, and it did not tremble.

They took care of me, I think now. Oh, yes. They took care.

"I was moved," I say, "by a very simple consideration. The woman had a child. I had the means to help. It seemed to me that, given the nature of this house, I ought."

"The nature of this house."

"Yes."

"You mean the Quiet Room."

I do not answer.

"Ambrose." She leans forward a little. Her voice is very low, and very warm, and very tired. "I'm going to say something and I want you to hear it as a friend."

"As a friend."

"You are losing your edge."

…

She opens the satchel.

She does it without hurry, working the brass clasp with her thumb. She takes out a folder. It is a plain buff folder, quite thin, tied with a faded blue tape. On its cover, in a hand I recognize from a hundred old prescriptions, is a single name.

ROSALIND ASHER KESTREL.

My mouth is dry.

"I've kept it all these years," says Cordelia. "I thought you might like to see it. It seems to me that you've lost your way a little, and a person who has lost his way sometimes needs a landmark."

She sets the folder on the arm of the chair.

She does not open it. She does not need to. I know what is in it. A death certificate, with a cause entered in a doctor's hand. Two signed statements. A page of notes in a nurse's writing, from a ward that no longer exists. And on the last sheet, in pencil, in the large careful lettering of a child of ten who has been asked to say what he saw, a single paragraph.

I went to the door of the quiet room. It was open. My mother was inside. A lady in a white coat was holding her arm. There was a needle.

I did not go in.

I wasn't supposed to be there.

I have not seen that page in thirty-one years. I would know it in the dark.

"I don't threaten, Ambrose," says Cordelia. "You know that. I have never needed to." She smooths a crease out of her skirt. "But I do think it's important that we all remember what we owe. You owe the family a good deal. I owe you a good deal in return. It's a delicate balance. And when I see one of my oldest friends begin to behave like a man who thinks he has been released..."

"I have not been released."

"No. You haven't."

"I am aware of that."

"Good." She smiles. It is a lovely smile, I have always thought: gentle, maternal, with a little crease at either corner of the mouth. "Then we understand each other."

…

I would like to describe what happens next with the exactness that is my profession.

I have, for thirty-one years, kept a certain room in my mind. It is a small room, whitewashed, windowless, with a steel door that locks from the outside. In it there is a boy. He is ten years old. He is standing in a corridor in his pajamas with his hand over his mouth. I put him there on the night of the fourth of November, and I have never once let him out.

At eleven forty-one on Christmas morning, the door opens.

I do not do it. I want that understood. I do not decide. I stand in my own parlor, in front of my own fire, and I look at a folded page on the arm of a chair, and something behind my breastbone gives way as a rotten beam gives, quietly, with a long slow crack.

I am angry.

I have not been angry in my adult life. I have been irritated, and weary, and grieved, and ashamed; I have felt the little tight pinch of disapproval that is the gentleman's allowance. But this is a thing I haven't met. It rises in me from some place under the floor. It is cold, and enormous, and wholly without noise. It is the anger of a boy in a corridor, and it has been waiting thirty-one years.

I look at Cordelia.

She is sitting in my chair, in my parlor, with her hands folded and her pale eyes fixed on my face. She has the expression of a woman watching a pot she is fairly sure will not boil.

And I understand, with great calm, that she is not afraid of me at all.

Of course she isn't, I think. Why would she be?

I have been her dog for thirty-one years.

"Cordelia," I say.

"Yes, dear?"

"Did you know Bridget Sorrell was going to die?"

A very small pause.

"I knew she was a risk."

"Did you know it last night?"

"I knew a good many things last night." She tilts her head. "You mustn't ask me questions you won't like the answers to."

"Did you order it?"

"Ambrose."

"Did you order it?"

"I should never," says Cordelia Marrow, "order anything so crude." She stands. She takes up the folder and slides it into the satchel and snaps the brass clasp. "I don't give orders. I make observations. I observe that a woman in a position of trust has been behaving strangely. I observe that there are people in my family who are inclined to be thorough. And I take no steps." She draws on her gloves. "That is the great advantage of being old. One needn't do anything. One need only not prevent."

I say nothing.

She goes to the door.

"Come to Marrow Hall on the first," she says. "Augustin will be there. We'll have a quiet dinner. I want you to see him; he's not well." She pauses. "And bring your patient. I find I'd like to meet her again."

"Again?"

"I think we've met." Her voice is mild. "I can't think where. A face one half remembers. It's probably nothing."

She looks at me for a moment longer.

"You do look tired, Ambrose," she says. "Get some sleep."

The door closes behind her.

…

I am still standing at the window when the car has gone.

I watch it down the drive, black on white, between the dark trunks of the beeches. I watch it reach the gate and turn. I do not move. A curious thing has happened to my hands. They have stopped trembling. I turn them over and examine them, the long fingers, the flat nails, the faint tracery of old scars from the nailbrush.

They are perfectly still.

I cross to the desk. I unlock the second drawer, and take out the sheet of paper I found this morning on the doormat of the study, slipped under the door sometime between three and seven. It is a plain page, folded once, written in soft pencil, in a clerk's block capitals.

YOU SAID YOU WOULD LIKE TO STOP BEING PATIENT. THE SECOND KEY IS ON THE THIRTY-FIRST OF DECEMBER. I WILL SHOW YOU.

BURN THIS.

— D.

I read it a third time.

The thirty-first of December.

Six days. It is not much. But I am a man who has waited thirty-one years, and I find I can do arithmetic.

I look at the left cufflink.

I turn it, once, without thinking. And then, because there is no one here, and no one watching, and the room is warm and smells of wood smoke and old paper, I take it off. I hold it in my palm. It is a small plain disc of silver, a little worn at the edge, engraved on the back with two letters. R.K. I have worn it every day since the day they handed it to me in an envelope.

I put it on the desk.

I take the other off, and place it beside the first.

And then I take up the pencil, and a clean sheet of paper, and begin, in the small upright hand of a man who has finally decided to be careless about doors, to write.

Dear Miss Castellane.